16.7. Connection to Digital Camera

AFAIK there are currently three methods to connect a digital camera to a
laptop: the infrared port (IrDA®), serial port and maybe USB. There
are also some auxiliary programs for conversion of pictures, etc.

Eric <dago_AT_tkg.att.ne.jp> wrote: "I finally succeeded in
downloading pictures from my digital camera, but not exactly the way I
expected, i.e. not through USB port but using
PCMCIA card port and memory stick device, part of
digital camera hardware. Anyway, some interesting things to mention:

Sony (pretending using a standard) uses the msdos format to store
images as JPEG files ; so the best way to have your OS recognizing
them is to mount the raw device like a msdos filesystem; using mount
directly doesn't work (don't know why) but an entry in the /etc/fstab
file allows you to mount the device correctly. i.e.:

/dev/hde1 /mnt/camera msdos user,noauto,ro 0 0

Of course, newfs before mount works
too, but there is nothing to see at all ;-) I think both
noauto and ro are important flags;
I tried without it and it didn't work. Somehow the mount I got seems
buggy . And if ro is missing, the camera doesn't
recognize back the memory stick and it needs to be msdos-formatted.

Appropriate to the camera documentation , both PCMCIA
and USB port behave the same (for Mac and Windoze -
i.e. you see a file system auto mounted) - I deduce for Linux it should
be the same thing too, as long as the USB driver is
installed. I think now that mounting USB raw device
the way I did with PCMCIA should work, but I still
couldn't find which device to use."

OpenDiS (Open Digita Support)
is a library and utility program for cameras such as the Kodak
DC-220, DC-260, DC-265, and DC-280, that run Flashpoint's Digita
operating system. The library is a unix implementation of the
Digita Host Interface Specification, intended for embedding
Digita support in other products such as
gPhoto. The utility is a simple command-line
program for standalone downloading of photos from the cameras.

gPhoto
enables you to take a photo from any digital camera, load it
onto your PC running a free operating system like GNU/Linux,
print it, email it, put it on your web site, save it on your
storage media in popular graphics formats or just view it on
your monitor. gPhoto sports a new HTML
engine that allows the creation of gallery themes (HTML
templates with special tags) making publishing images to the
world wide web a snap. A directory browse mode is implemented
making it easy to create an HTML gallery from images already on
your computer. Support for the Canon PowerShot A50, Kodak
DC-240/280 USB, and Mustek MDC-800 digital cameras.

photopc
is a library and a command-line frontend to manipulate
digital still cameras based on Fujitsu chipset and Siarra
Imaging firmware. The program is known to work with Agfa,
Epson and Olympus cameras. Should also work with Sanyo, but
this is untested. The cameras typically come with software
for Windows and for Mac, and no description of the protocol.
With this tool, they are manageable from a
UNIX box. Bruce D. Lightner
<lightner_AT_metaflow.com> has added support for
Win32 and DOS platforms. Note that the program does not
have any GUI, it is plain command-line even on Windows.
For a GUI, check out the phototk
program.